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AbstractDuring the First World War the survival of hundreds of thousands of Latvian refugees, dispersed across the Russian Empire, overlapped with issues of identity. Latvians in Siberia and the Far East created a refugee organisation complete with military, diplomatic and cultural programmes for themselves and their homeland. The key players attempted to recreate the same organisational trajectories and outcomes during the Second World War, under very different geopolitical conditions. This article presents new archival research and suggests new interpretations of the dynamic nature of political organisation, refugee experience and identity in Latvia through the first half of the twentieth century.

Explores 1920s Latvian educational policy reform, sheds light on the secret, extralegal Joint Committee, & outlines some fundamental assumptions of Latvian nationalists working within the central state before & after the authoritarian coup of 1934. Focus is on the free lunch program. Chronicling the work of the Joint Committee reveals several themes in interwar Latvia's history. With peace, the state began to identify minorities as the greatest threat to its existence. This assumption underpinned the notion of an ethnic Latvian nation-state. The Joint Committee worked to assimilate the Slavic minorities through education or at least guarantee their allegiance to the state. The minutes of Joint Committee meetings reveal differing ideas about nationality & identity (innate vs learned), but also a common determination to use the powers of the state against the spirit of the law & democracy. This penchant for statism preceded the 1934 coup, but was symptomatic of it, & was shared by ethnic Latvian intellectuals, bureaucrats, & politicians across the political spectrum. The common assumption that free lunches could shift school attendance & engineer identity is indicative of how they understood Latvia's eastern borders & communities. These ethnic Latvian bureaucrats (& others) saw an ambiguous ethnic frontier that had to be made Latvian to guarantee the survival of the state. The outcome of the bureaucrat-nationalist free lunch program is then gauged, finding that it was not around long enough to effect the transformations hoped for. However, the free lunch program & the overall nationalizing policy evoked a degree of "Latvianization" of ethnic Slavs on the frontier. The state, although not forceful & violent, harbored malevolent intentions toward minority communities & acted on these intentions via state policy. The minutes of the Committee (& the work of the Census office) also suggest that Latvia's bureaucrat-nationalists merged an essential, primordial definition of ethnicity with an ability to shift ethnicity via government policy. Implications for the current contentious situation in Latvia are considered. 1 Table, 31 References. J. Zendejas

Purs reviews 'Karlis Ulmanis Trimda un Cietuma, Dokumenti un Materiali (Karlis Ulmanis in Exile and Prison, Documents and Materials)' edited and with an introduction by Indulis Ronis.

The past one hundred years have been a very trying time for Latvia, complete with success, tragedy, and still unrealized promise. Within the course of a generation, the country experienced revolutions, wars and independent statehood, and then the slide into authoritarianism. World War II brought new occupations. The tragedies were staggering: holocaust, executions, and an exodus of refugees. Soviet consolidation bred deportations, forced collectivization and partisan warfare. Almost fifty years later, Latvia regained its independence and emerged from decades of disastrous Soviet rule.This

The past one hundred years have been a very trying time for Latvia, complete with success, tragedy, and still unrealized promise. Within the course of a generation, the country experienced revolutions, wars and independent statehood, and then the slide into authoritarianism. World War II brought new occupations. The tragedies were staggering: holocaust, executions, and an exodus of refugees. Soviet consolidation bred deportations, forced collectivization and partisan warfare. Almost fifty years later, Latvia regained its independence and emerged from decades of disastrous Soviet rule. This.